Chapter 2. Ethnic participation in Dutch amateur football clubs 29 2.4 Results A diversifying football sector lagging behind the general population The first notable thing in table 2.1 is the fact that the amateur football sector in the Netherlands, perhaps quite unsurprisingly, mainly consists of ethnically Dutch members – i.e. members with two parents born in the Netherlands. However, while 84.87% of the members are ethnically Dutch in 2005, we can witness a clear and gradual decrease of this share to 83.15% of the members in 2014. While the proportion of Dutch members in amateur football has shrunk over time, their number in table 2.2 shows an increase over time. Therefore, the data from table 2.1 and table 2.2 on Dutch members primarily show that ethnic minorities have increasingly found their way into amateur football clubs in the past years and that this growth has not been matched by an equal growth of Dutch members, resulting in a gradual reduction of the share of ethnically Dutch members and an increase of the ethnic minority group as a whole. Table 2.3 and 2.4 show that in comparison to the general population, Dutch members are overrepresented in amateur football. While 84.87% of the members in 2005 are ethnically Dutch, only 80.73% of the general population can be classified as such in the same year. This is in line with observations showing that ethnic minorities in the Netherlands on average are less likely to be engaged in associational activities than the Dutch population (Huijnk & Andriessen, 2016). However, the difference is not very pronounced, which could suggest that amateur football clubs in general have a relatively low threshold for participation by ethnic minorities in comparison to other types of civil society organizations. Furthermore, we can see that the share of Dutch people within the general population also dropped over time. The same explanation holds true here, namely that this is not due to the number of ethnically Dutch people – the number grows every single year except for 2013 - but because the growth of ethnic minorities surpasses that of their Dutch counterparts. By comparing table 2.1 and table 2.3 we can also see that the relative share of Dutch people within the population drops slightly faster than the share of Dutch members in amateur football. This implies that while ethnic minorities have increasingly found their way into amateur football, this development lags behind the change in the total population. So far, this pattern is largely in line with what previous studies have indicated about ethnic participation in sports, although it must be noted that the gap between ethnic minority and majority members is not very large. However,
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